She’s about to say something else when a doorbell peals so loudly, I almost jump. I’m reminded of the small matter of locating Ryan Daley, which completely slipped my mind during the insane amount of time it took us to find me something to wear. Irina’s heart gives a sudden lurch.
‘You promised you’d help me find him, find Ryan,’ I remind Gia.
She shakes her head warningly, already heading towards the door. ‘Not now,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘That will be Felipe, and Felipe is not accustomed to being ignored.’ Her tone is derisive.
I trail awkwardly after her in the crippling, shiny heels she picked out for me to wear. When she flings open the door to my suite, I see a handsome, sun-bronzed, strong-featured young man standing there. Mid to late twenties, with black, slicked-back hair. He’s shorter than I am in my absurd footwear, and broad-shouldered, muscular, powerful-looking. He’s wearing a single-breasted charcoal grey suit over a black turtleneck, a camel-coloured overcoat and expensive-looking, spit-and-polish black lace-up brogues. He’s carrying a pair of cream and tan, perforated leather driving gloves in one hand. As he follows Gia into the stately sitting room of the suite, I see open admiration in his dark eyes. For me.
Even though I consider myself impervious to all forms of flattery, I find myself blushing suddenly under his appreciative and unblinking scrutiny. Even Ryan never looked at me the way this guy’s doing now. Like I’m good enough to … devour. I don’t know whether to feel pleased, or revolted.
‘¡Querida!’ the young man murmurs in a low, musical voice like an auditory caress. ‘Cómo ardo al pensar en su belleza, a pesar de su maldad infernal.’
Gia shoots Felipe a scandalised look.
I feel Irina’s face suddenly flush with a strange, hectic blood, her heartbeat kick into higher gear. It’s Spanish. I actually recognise it.
But I don’t recall any past facility with Spanish at all. So where is this coming from?
Literally, the guy had said —
Darling! How your beauty sets me on fire, despite your infernal evil.
I don’t know how it’s possible, but when I reach out for the words I need, the words I want to use, they’re somehow there.
‘Qué simpatico … como siempre, querido Felipe,’ I reply tersely. ‘But let’s speak English, for Gia’s sake, ¿le parece bien?’
There are accents on all the wrong places, accents where there shouldn’t be any, but from the looks on both their faces, I’ve just made perfect sense in a language I shouldn’t even know.
‘You’re speaking English for my sake?’ Gia says disbelievingly.
The confident smile on Felipe’s handsome face falters for a moment, before it’s smoothly re-established. ‘Your Spanish, Senorita Zhivanevskaya,’ he says, his perfect white teeth showing, ‘he has improved very much.’
‘Yes, “he” has,’ Gia mutters. ‘Out of sight. So tell me again, Irina, why you insisted on hiring that creepy translator for the Costa Rican swimsuit shoot last month?’
From the look on Gia’s face, it’s clear that the only languages Irina’s supposed to have are Russian and bitchy conversational English.
‘Sit,’ I tell Felipe, still pretending I didn’t hear Gia’s question. I gesture at the two pairs of elegant winged armchairs facing each other either side of a monumental glass and steel coffee table bearing porcelain cups and saucers and a sleek, silver, lidded jug.
Gia and I take our places across from Felipe and, for a moment, I do not hear the icily correct small talk that the two of them are exchanging. Lela Neill hadn’t spoken Spanish. Neither had Lucy, or Susannah. Or Ezra before them. But with a name like Zappacosta, I’m guessing that Carmen might be able to. And now I can, too? Even though I passed through Carmen’s body … two lives ago? Or does this ability come from somewhere else, some when else? Some ‘life’ even further back than the time I was Carmen?
The cool-hued room seems to tilt. There’s a sudden sensation that I’m freefalling, though my physical body sits here, unmoved. What’s inside always so very different from what’s outside.
As if from very far away, I hear Gia enquire frostily of our guest, ‘Tea?’, before picking up the silver thermos and pouring a shot of hot, dark amber liquid into one of the crested white teacups on the table before her. It’s a trait so peculiar to the English, and as I direct my unfocused gaze at the steam coming off the surface of the drink, I can almost make out every particle rising.
Felipe shakes his head dismissively, unfolding a road map from a pocket of his overcoat. He spreads it out on the table between us with his tanned, long-fingered hands, before uncapping a gold and onyx fountain pen.
Something tugs away at my subconscious, begging to be made plain. That small voice inside me, that’s always one step ahead of my waking self, murmurs: Gabriel, Uriel, Michael, Jegudiel, Selaphiel, Jeremiel, Barachiel, Raphael.
Eight names more familiar to me than my own. Eight names that could be a poem. Or … a prayer.
Inexplicably, that YouTube clip of Uriel walking on water, the one Ryan had told me to look at, replays itself in my head. He was gliding across the surface of an icy Scottish loch, searching for something or … someone?
And on the heels of that thought — the recollection that when I touch someone — someone unguarded, someone human — their thoughts and emotions, even their memories, become like an open book to me.
How are these things even remotely connected to the fact that when I’m pushed to the brink I can hurt people with my bare hands?
Twice now, I’ve almost torn myself free of the body I’ve been placed in. It happened once when I was Carmen, when I was wild with fear and anger. It happened again when I was Lela. I’d placed a hand upon Lela’s mother as she lay dying and had somehow seen inside her cancer-ridden body. I’d even tried to heal her from the inside out — before I’d been forced to return into Lela.
I hadn’t been able to save Karen Neill, because Azraeil had already marked her for his own.
Azraeil. I frown.
Like the Eight, he’s one of the elohim. But one thing sets him apart from the others. His touch can bring … death. Or restore life in equal measure.
Traits. They’re all traits, I realise suddenly. These things I can do that I can’t explain. Even that strange ability Azraeil has, which no one else possesses — mastery over death itself. All these are traits. Peculiar to our kind. In us, when we were first … created.
I squeeze my eyes shut, chasing down thoughts that refuse to come clear.
Gia turns to me and queries, ‘Irina? What do you think of braving Via Broletto today? Too risky?’
I shake my head blindly, waving at her, at Felipe, to decide.
When I was Lela, I met a rogue malakh — a kind of supernatural messenger — who’d chosen exile on earth rather than fulfil the task for which it was created. Somehow it had glimpsed me inside Lela’s skin; had claimed that it could detect the protective mark of the elohim upon me. It had begged me to intercede with the elohim on its behalf because it needed a human body in which to live out its days. For in turning away from its original purpose, it had doomed itself to an eternal and painful half-life as a wandering, formless spirit.
It had envied me — me! — and the fact that I was constantly being reborn in a succession of mortal bodies.
Elohim. When I was Lela, even probing the meaning of that word had caused me unimaginable pain.
But now, that small voice inside me, which is always, always, one beat ahead of my waking self, whispers: Most holy, most high. Together with a thousand others that no mortal alive has ever seen, or could ever give name to. Whatever you may be now, however estranged you have become